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Yeah, but if you try to bullshit a proprietary license as "open source" you're going to catch hell from a whole lot of people. It's not just the OSI that has a
by rectang 5y ago
Yeah, but if you try to bullshit a proprietary license as "open source" you're going to catch hell from a whole lot of people. It's not just the OSI that has a stake in the OSD.
A few companies have tried it and backed off.
- kube-system 5y agoYes, you will get criticism, depending on the circumstances. If it's proprietary, sure, if it's public domain, probably not.
- remram 5y agoIf it's public domain then it is open source as per the OSI definition.
- rectang 5y agoReplace "public domain" with "CC0" and it's a fair point. OSI hasn't approved CC0, and it's worth questioning how important OSI's whitelist is, or whether they should be the ones curating it. But everybody kinda knows that CC0 is more or less in the spirit of the OSD (so long as there are no patents involved) and OSI doesn't go around hollering about it, because it's not that important. As opposed to the Commons Clause, and other historical attempts to undermine "open source" as being nothing more than "source available" — those are battles worth fighting. The OSD is more important than OSI. If OSI were ever to change the OSD in a substantive way, there would be a huge revolt against them.
- account42 5y ago> Replace "public domain" with "CC0" and it's a fair point. OSI hasn't approved CC0 From https://opensource.org/faq#cc-zero https://opensource.org/faq#cc-zero > CC0 was not explicitly rejected, but the License Review Committee was unable to reach consensus that it should be approved, and Creative Commons eventually withdrew the application. The most serious of the concerns raised had to do with the effects of clause 4(a), which reads: "No ... patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document.". While many open source licenses simply do not mention patents, it is exceedingly rare for open source licenses to explicitly disclaim any conveyance of patent rights, and the Committee felt that approving such a license would set a dangerous precedent, and possibly even weaken patent infringement defenses available to users of software released under CC0. So it's more that there are concerns and nobody has cared enough to fully resolve them to arrive at a clear answer. It's also not like the CC licenses are commonly used for software so this is not surprising.
- kube-system 5y agoThat is not OSIs position. For example: https://opensource.org/node/878 https://opensource.org/node/878
- remram 5y agoThe argument there is: > it’s impossible to make a globally applicable statement that a certain piece of software is in the public domain Not that something truly in the public domain is not open source.